This week, a New York state supreme court judge ruled that Google (owners of Blogger.com) must turn over the electronic identity of an anonymous blogger who repeatedly attacked New York model Liskula Cohen, calling her "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank", among other things, on a blog titled "Skanks in NYC". Because Cohen has grounds to sue the blogger for defamation, the court ordered Google to cough up a name to allow her to fill in the "defendant" blank. Naturally, this has some of the more libertarian-minded among us crying, "Censorship!" and "What about freedom of speech?" and "Will they be coming for my anonymous blog next?"

What those people forget is that defamation laws were around in some form long before the US constitution was written. Freedom of speech is all well and good – and believe me, I'm a big fan – but slander is not protected. This is not news. And if your insults come up high in search engine results for your target, affecting her reputation and employability, a lawsuit should not come as a big shock.

As for the hand-wringing about privacy, I hate to be the one to break it to the internet, but that horse is out of the barn. As Peter Cohen writes at All Things Digital, "Every time you use the internet, you're leaving a trail of identifiable information." Or, as my husband, an internet marketing professional who's been active in online communities for nearly 20 years, put it, "Anyone who thinks they're actually anonymous is a complete moron."

Yet all over the web, people operating under the illusion that their identities are thoroughly hidden continue to prove John Gabriel's famous theory of internet behaviour: Normal person + anonymity + audience = total prat. And too often, particularly when it comes to misogynistic attacks that not only harm women's public reputations but drive them away from participating in online communities, citizens of the internet side with the prats. People become obsessed with hypothetical legal arguments about freedom of speech – even the kind of speech that's never been protected – to the exclusion of looking at a larger, more important question: What kind of internet culture do we want?

Just as in the real world, online discourse is exactly as civilized as people make it. Standards don't come from law but from unspoken codes of behaviour, and the social pressure exerted on those who, according to said standards, are acting like jerks. Every online insult does not demand a lawsuit – if it did, I'd have about a thousand different suits pending as we speak – but we've spent too long letting hateful troublemakers equate "freedom of speech" with "freedom from criticism or consequences". And the more we argue about online harassment from a strictly legalistic perspective, the more we ignore the fundamental issue: cowards who use a veil of anonymity, however flimsy and easily shredded, to launch attacks on their enemies, really ought to be silenced. Perhaps not by law, but by an online society that unequivocally rejects such behaviour as inappropriate, immature, and unwelcome.

So far, we've failed to create that society, prioritising overblown fears of future oppressive regulation above properly ostracising people who cause real harm and contribute nothing of value. So if it takes a lawsuit to make people think twice about trashing others for sport in a medium that can attach an innocent woman's name to the phrase "psychotic, lying, whoring skank" into perpetuity (an eventuality I'm now contributing to – sorry, Ms Cohen), then call me a stereotypical litigious American, but I'm for it.